The number of people leaving Britain has dropped to its lowest number in a
decade, with 286,000 people emigrating in 2012

The numbers of people leaving Britain are at their lowest level for a decade, giving hope that a so-called “brain drain” is slowing down.

Some 286,000 people left the country to live overseas in 2012, the lowest level since 2001 and a drop of 26,000 on the previous year.

These included 126,000 British citizens, a drop of 8,000 on the year before and below the decade-long average of 152,000 a year. Senior Conservatives have previously warned of a “brain drain” of the best and brightest emigrating to find work abroad during the recession.

Over the past decade, some 3.2 million people have left the United Kingdom, including 1.52 million British passport-holders.

Contrary to the popular belief that the majority of Britons who move abroad are retirees, just 119,000 were above the age of retirement. Nearly two million were aged 25 to 44.

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However, that trend of working-age people emigrating is slowing down, according to the Office for National Statistics. In 2012, 267,000 working-age people moved overseas, the lowest level since 2007 and a drop of 26,000 on the year before.

However, the number of British passport-holders leaving is still outstripping the numbers returning by a ratio of almost two to one.

The reverse is true for other nationalities. Some 380,000 non-British people moved to the UK in 2012, compared with 160,000 who left.

Meanwhile, separate figures from the United Nations have shown that more than five million British people now live abroad. That is an increase from 4.6 million in 2010 and 3.9 million in 1990.

Australia is the most popular destination, with 1.2 million British expats, ahead of the US, home to 758,000 Britons, and Canada, where 674,000 live.

One of the biggest growth destinations is South Africa, whose British expatriate population has more than doubled since the end of apartheid to 305,000.

There have also been growing numbers of Britons living in the former Eastern Bloc since the final days of the communist era in 1990: up from 98 to 4,276 in Slovakia, from 2,725 to 37,000 in Poland, and from 440 to 3,846 in Romania. The UN research showed that worldwide the advent of cheap flights and the need to find work has seen more people than ever living outside the country where they were born — 232 million, or three per cent of the global population.

Europe remains the most popular regional destination with 72 million international migrants in 2013, compared with 71 million in Asia.

Despite there being almost 200 countries in the world, half of all immigration takes place into just 10 countries — including the UK. While five million Britons live abroad, there are almost eight million immigrants living in the UK.

The United States is home to the most immigrants anywhere in the world, with 45.8 million, followed by Russia (11 million), Germany (9.8 million), Saudi Arabia (9.1 million) and the United Arab Emirates (7.8 million).

Despite being the country ranked 80th in the world by land size, the UK is home to the joint fifth highest number of immigrants with 7.8 million, ahead of France (7.4 million), Canada (7.3 million), Australia (6.5 million), and Spain (6.5 million).